7am: wake – up. It’s so friggin’ cold in here at night: my bedding consists of one thin blanket 2 sweatshirts, both my rain ponchos, my half-dry towel and my jeans.

8am: we sneek in and take b-fast in the hotel. 13 Euros each is a bit steep but is justified by the fact that we steal lots of food for lunch, spare sugar for Har-V’s kitchen drawer and both grab a trucker’s shower in the lobby toilet. In addition we charged many batteries there for free so I’m saying it’s payback.

10am: I have explained to David Smadja my helper / driver the old English sailing term Ship-shape and Bristol fashion. Being Parisian he’s convinced I’m off my trolley.

11am: I’m sitting in big Garmie, my nickname for the Garmin Chipotle coach, and we’re off to the races. The bus has anti-bac dispensers everywhere and you MUST use them. The Tour is so stressful to the rider’s immune system that no-one wants to get a cold from film-makers and all the other riff-raff the riders come into contact with. They start taking pix of me shooting them. I take this as a promising sign of acceptance.

1pm: They’re off and suddenly Smudger and I have our own race to take part in.The race book shows us exactly how to get out of town and, while the riders have their route to follow, we have our own so we follow the orange signs across the Breton peninsula.

430pm: As we approach St. Brieuc the orange signs give way to signs of many colours: We want the green signs (Radio and TV) that will lead us to our special parking spots. They lead us straight onto the course and we drive the last 2 k at roughly the speed the riders will be doing it in half an hour’s time: 35mph! The crowd on either side look at us disconsolantly: “Allez-vous en” I sense them saying; “Piss off!

432: We approach the finishing straight (uphill) and our lead-out man in a blue Skoda suddenly slows and we’re overtaken by the municipal cleaning truck.

5pm: We’re at the finishing line with cameras: there’s definitely some sort of TdF finish line heirarchy going on here. I can get close with my backstage pass but what I have is not ALL ACCESS. It seems those are only given to people with huge freaking cameras who wear casual Italian loafers and have an account in Milan’s version of Eddie Bauer. It seems that a heavy dose of attitude is also mandatory. So, as Thor Hushovd comes hurtling by with a big winner’s grin on, I have to leap out from nowhere and start looking for my guys as the scrum presses in on TH and the yellow jersey.

“.. a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled “How Biofuels Could Starve The Poor” …points out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn – roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year….When it comes to alternatives to cheap oil…The harsh truth is that there are no alternatives to cheap oil – the future is about smarter ways to live with less oil, not dumber ways to perpetuate mindless consumption.”
The Ethanol Scam by Jeff Goodell – Rolling Stone 9th August 2007

“To the French the Tour de France isn’t a mere bike race but a test of courage, morale and character like none other; a forum for epic individual combat, for clarification of the rapports between men and between men and nature.” – Graeme Fife, Inside the Peloton.

“I don’t like bellyachers. If you’re an actor you do what you’re supposed to do. Shakespeare was a journeyman actor. He didn’t realise his plays would be that great. The year that his own King Lear was done, he played a minor role in somebody else’s version of Lear done by his company. And he endured it.” Jeff Corey, Tender Comrades

I don’t ever remember meeting Hugh Attwooll. He was the drummer of my first ever real band, the Stiff All Stars, and together we formed the rhythm section of a bunch of record industry acolytes with dreams of winning some respect and admiration from our peers. We probably never achieved the former and only had the latter because the word ‘begrudging’ was placed in front of it: after all, while some talked at coffee breaks about being enthusiastic music fans, we were actually out there doing it, playing at the Hope & Anchor, Dingwalls, and The Venue on weekends and nights off.

Hugh was bespectacled, quiet and even when he was in a funk he seemed good humoured and approachable. I would love to see him set up his kit. Nothing would hurry him. He would place the pieces in the order that suited him best and then pick them up again only to place them on what seemed exactly the same spot. He would sit behind the kit look at every stand and drum and then get up again, tour the podium, rearrange, somewhat delicately, a cymbal stand or a floor tom and then sit down once more. On sitting down this last time he would take a breath, adjust his glasses, pick up his sticks and ponder for a minute as if thinking about some other matter before he would look up, smile at us all and then, finally, be ready to play. Unlike most every other drummer in the world he had hardly made a sound up to this point.

Hugh and I were the worrying, rusty tack in the sole of our leader Andy’s rock n’ roll shoe. He wanted us to swing like Like Little Feat or rumble like Rockpile, and with my bass playing there was never any chance of that, but we were efficient and light-hearted and enjoyed ourselves and we would crack jokes behind Andy’s back about his Rick-Neilsen-sized guitar collection and his endless search for the right amp-placement on our postage stamp sized stages.

Out of the band Hugh worked selflessly at CBS, as it then was, and I would talk up the fact that without him Julio Iglesias would never have had a hit in the English speaking world. Hugh spoke Spanish fluently and apparently convinced Julio and the label to rerecord his biggest hits in English with the result that the one-time goalie took off in America and conquered the other half of the world he had not already seduced. As a result Julio was able to buy some more yachts, while Hugh received another paycheck.

It is maybe fifteen years since I last saw Hugh or spoke with him, perhaps longer. I realise that maybe I never knew him well – he was the lovely guy I met through friends who was married and had kids. His smile lit up rooms and the way he quietly corrected or disagreed with you was a master class in diplomacy.

As Joni Mitchell and countless others have pointed out, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Hugh died last week from cancer and suddenly it seems that my band suddenly has something in common with Zeppelin and the Who – we’ve all lost our drummers and there’ll never be a satisfactory replacement.

For pictures of Hugh and examples of his fine drumming check out www.myspace.com/stiffallstars